The Game Archaeologist and the What Ifs: Climax's Warhammer Online

One of the most notable features of Climax's Warhammer -- and what it will be remembered for -- was an intense, unrelentingly dark atmosphere -- almost grim, as some described it. In an interview with GameZone, Climax touted this approach with glee: "Warhammer aims at a grittier realism where the downtrodden peasantry is suitably terrified of the monsters that really do go bump in the night (mainly when they drop the bodies they've been carrying)."

Playable races announced included Humans, Elves, Dwarfs, Halflings and Ogres. Four starting classes were also released: Warrior, Academic, Rogue and Adventurer. Guilds would be called "Warrior Companies," and clothing and armor would be independent graphical layers that would go on top of your character's model versus the standard "reskinning" the basic character model that was standard at the time.

It was stated that the large game world (set in the Reikland) would take around 12 to 14 hours to walk its seamless 400 kilometers end-to-end. Along the way, players would find three cities, 12 towns, 30 villages, 30 farmsteads, 18 coaching inns, 15 dungeons and other various landmarks to explore. The game world's look skewed to the more realistic than stylistic, saturated with dark and muted tones. Weather effects were planned along with seasons, including snowfall that would actually accumulate over time and other effects that would affect combat.

This world wouldn't be predictable, either. Enemies would roam randomly, and if left unchecked, would start to congregate in even greater numbers and potentially build NPC camps standard "reskinning" the basic character model that was standard at the time.

Noise was made by Climax about getting away from level-based advancement toward a more skill-based system. The idea here was that you would earn reputation with a certain group and then join them to learn what career skills they could teach (including non-combat abilities). Careers were lumped into various tiers that represented the power and difficulty level of the skills. You could easily learn Career 1 skills, but you had to jump through a lot of hoops to access Career 2, and so on.

Once you accumulated a certain set of skills, you would find yourself fitting into a class of sorts. A Master Assassin required beggar, ruffian and herbalist skills, among others. The higher you went in the career tiers, the more you became flagged for PvP to members of opposing career sets. As far as I can tell, this type of PvP flagging would not be optional but integrated.

While several locale names -- like the city of Altdorf -- might be familiar to today's WAR crowd, Climax's game seems almost radically different from what we've ended up with now. The planned server sizes would be relatively tiny (4000 to 6000 in population), voice acting non-existent, inventory would consider weight as a factor, combat would be round-based (not real time) to compensate for slower internet connections, trading between various NPC vendors would be a viable way to make a buck, and GMs would stage numerous live events such as invasions.

Interestingly enough, Climax's Warhammer would have come replete with an in-game journal that would record every quest undertaken, every mob killed, atlases and so forth -- a precursor to Mythic's famous Tome of Knowledge, perhaps?

As the world of Warhammer was deeply suspicious of magic -- almost anti-magic, in fact -- the magic system in Warhammer Online would be altered from most traditional fantasy MMO models. Each zone would have a certain magical attunement, resulting in varying streams of magical energy that players could draw on for their diabolical spells. What might be easy to cast in one area would be almost impossible in another, depending on the spell in question.